… interesting tidbits of release engineering.

More VIM fun: Vundle

During this last RelEng workweek, I thought I’d try a new VIM plugin for
reST: RIV. While that didn’t work out great (yet), it did get me to
start using Vundle. Vundle is a quite nice vim plugin manager, and is
easier for me to understand than Pathogen.

using with bundles not managed by either Pathogen or Vundle.
(While Vundle running won’t interfere with unmanaged bundles, the
:BundleClean command will claim they are unused and offer to
delete them. That’s just too risky for me.)

The two cases appear to have the same solution:

ensure all directories in the bundle location (typically
~/.vim/bundles/) are managed by Vundle.

use a file:// URI for any bundle you don’t want Vundle to
update.

For example, I installed the ctrlp bundle a while back, from the
Bitbucket (hg) repository. (Yes, there (now?) is a github repository,
but why spoil my fun.) Since the hg checkout already lived in
~/.vim/bundle, I only needed to add the following line to my vimrc
file:

Bundle 'file:///~/.vim/bundle/ctrlp.vim/'

Vundle no longer offers to delete that repository when BundleClean
is run.

I suspect I’ll get errors if I ever asked Vundle to update that repo,
but that isn’t in my plans. I believe my major use case for Vundle will
be to trial install plugins, and then BundleClean will clean things
up safely.